
Class, , 7 K ^ A4— 



V 



AMERICAN LOYALTY. 



WASHINGTON FOUNDER, WEBSTER 
EXPOUNDER 

OF THE 

FEDERAL CONSTITUTION. 



AN ADDRESS, 

(Delivered June 20th , iSgj ; during Commencement 

Exercises of the University of Georgia, by invito,* 

Hon of the Alumni Society, and published 

at its request. 



HENRY R§ JACKSON, LL.D. 



SAVANNAH, GA. 
1893. 



JK246 



f GEORGE IM. NICHOLS. | 






Ladies and Gentlemen : 

The oration of Mr. Chauncey M. Depew on the hun- 
dredth anniversary of the inauguration of President 
Washington suggested the remarks I am now about 
to make. I had hoped to utter them or their like, 
very shortly after that historic occasion, before another 
academic institution. Disappointed in this, and sub- 
sequently honored by the invitation which has brought 
me hither, after serious hesitancy because of the lapse 
of time, I have concluded that it will not be possible 
for me to do better than to offer them here. 

It ought certainly to go without saying, I think, 
that, Daniel Webster dead, the lirst centennial cel- 
ebration of Washington's inauguration could but be 
incomplete. It had the Master's own special work for 
the greatest word-painter that ever tilled the rostrum. 
Belonging, not less to the Southern than to the East- 
ern, Northern or Western States, the occasion itself 
had its own special need of as catholic a patriot as 
ever faced an American audience. How sadly, then, 
did it recall the orator who above all others by his 
utterances, and the statesman who, even more signally 
in his career, had illustrated the distinctive American 
meaning of the word Loyalty ! No dictionary gives 
it. Noah Webster, of A. D. 1859, defines the word 
thus: u Loyal, a. — True to plighted faith, duty or 
love, as a loyal subject, a loyal wife." " Loyalty, n. — 
Fidelity to a prince or sovereign, or to a husband or 
lover." 

But, since July 4th, 1776, for the people of the 
North American State Sovereignties, there had been 
no prince ! Did the declarers of independence, and 
the framers of the constitution, when they abolished 
princes, abolish also loyalty % Did they kill the 
nerve of that governmental force which drew Europe 
out of the Night of the Middle Ages ; giving root and 



sap to the outgrowth of the Feudal System, and, 
through it, to the entire super-growth of modern 
European civilization ? — already somewhat old when 
transplanted to this new continent by our loyal fore- 
fathers. Its tap-root deadened by their rebel sons, 
have the leaves begun so soon, and — appalling thought ! 
• — for us, to wither ? 

Noah Webster, of A. D. 1869, thus defines the 
word: " Loyal, a. — Devoted to the maintenance of 
law." " Loyalty, n. — The state or quality of being 
loyal." 

The word still there! but where the passion that it 
named ? Who loves the law ? Who loves the Con- 
stitution, State or Federal? Who can love the 
abstract law i God permits us to love nothing Him- 
self in nature did not make. A man ? — a dog ?-— Yes ! 
A tree ? — a lake ? — a mountain ? — 

*' Lives there a man with soul so dead 

Who never to himself hath said. 
This is my own, my native land ?" 

But a book ? — a code of laws ? — a statue ? When 
has frantic youth drowned himself in the Arno because 
of love for the Venus de Medici ? In the twinkling of 
an eye the lexicographer w x ould transport us over dead 
centuries of Christian European history back to the 
living Pagan language which has given root to a word 
it did not have itself ; and had it not because the 
Feudal passion had no place in the Pagan soul. It 
did not speak, at Thermopylae, in the message : 
" Traveller, tell it in Lacedaemon that we fell here in 
obedience to her laws." It was not at Rome near 
great Caesar, when, with u et In Brute" on his lips, 
he died. And when, to avert ideal danger from hi& 
imperial master, Antinous sprang into the Nile, the 
dazed classic intellect, vainly seeking the impulse in 
emotion known beneath the sun, located it above the 
stars ; apotheosized the suicide, and the humble page 
became a Pagan god. Apotheosis startlingly excep- 



tional to the otherwise exceptionless rule of the Pagan 
Mythology ! — which had already crowded its Olympus 
with divinities, each of them but a reflection of some 
self -asserting attribute of mere human nature ; show- 
ing that the civilization of the Greek and the Roman — 
which had probably carried philosophic thought, and 
art conception and execution, to their culminating 
points — even in this its latter day, was still alive to 
the old, pre-historic, yearning of earth discontent 
for something assumed — may it not have been felt \ — 
to be in the ultimate heaven. For modern, probably ; 
nay ! comparatively speaking, very, very, very mod- 
ern, possibly, the reported dialogue between the two 
Athenians, who, standing upon the top-most peak ever 
scaled by the pure intellect of earth — with arms out- 
stretched into the thin, cold air, and eyes upturned to 
the cold, unsympathetic stars — exclaimed, 

SocPwATES — " A man must come to tell us more.'' 
Alcibiades — " He cannot come too soon.'' 
Was not this, probably, but repetition of what had 
already occurred, nay ! had been occurring, and cast- 
ing its shadow in tradition backward \ — the piling, 
for example, of Pelion and Ossa upon Olympus to 
scale celestial walls, followed by the descent of the 
mountains upon the giants of Earth ; the building of 
the tower of Babel, followed by the confusion of 
tongues ; the stealing by the afterward rock-held, vul- 
ture devoured Prometheus for Earth of the fire of 
Heaven. Not thus was it to come ! And when it did 
in fact come — to teach by the birth in a stable, and 
the death upon a cross, that "The foolishness of God 
is wiser than men; the weakness of God is stronger 
than men;*' and thus to fortify the finite mind of 
Man against that God-annihilating craze which, but 
for this interposition of Heaven, must have indubita- 
bly followed the then approaching telescopic revela- 
tion of the material infinite, the lesson was too anni- 
hilating of the self-sufficiency of a purely intellectual 



6 

civilization for acceptance by it. Once again the giant 
of Earth rose Heaven-defying ; and once again down 
came the imprecated mountain — in form, assuredly, 
not unprecedented ! Let the exhumations by our own 
generation in Asia Minor bear testimony ! side by side 
with the exhumations by many generations in Rome ; 
not alone on Palatine-hill, but throughout the entire 
site of the modern and all over the Campagna, site 
also of the ancient city or its suburbs — exhumations 
of the beautiful bones of a dead civilization, scarce 
colder in death than it was in life, where they lay 
buried, by no abrasion of an Alp, it is true, by no 
Vesuvian eruption, but, literally, by the slow drift- 
ing^ of the dust of ages ! — no hand so active as to 
brush it aside ; no taste so living as to remove "the 
thing of beauty" to be "a joy forever 1 ' in some 
human home ! When its shadows could thus rest so 
heavily upon "the Eternal City," how dark over 
Europe generally — and especially those vast provinces 
which lay out of sight of the few other minor centers 
where the monk could keep his taper burning — how 
dark must have been that mediaeval night ! 

In the Heathen, and in the Pagan, and, heretofore, 
in the Christian world ; and, hereafter, if the sombre 
picture vaticinated by Macauley of the New Zea- 
lander standing upon London Bridge and sketching 
the ruins of St. Paul shall be realized, how closely 
does the life of society, or the aggregate-man, 
assimilate to that of the unit-man ? in birth, child- 
hood, youth, maturity, decrepitude, and death? — the 
civilizations and the barbarisms of the one, to the good 
habits and the bad habits of the other ? — no habit and 
no civilization to be displaced by a coup de main, or a 
coup d'etat; nor yet by a miracle from Heaven ! — to 
be conquered only by the gradual substitution of 
another. And the process, how like the movement of 
an armed invasion ?— capturing territory, holding it, 
extending it, losing it ; recapturing it, times and times 



again without number, until the final result shall have 
been reached in the absorption or the extermination 
of the one by the other. 

And the dissolution of a civilization, how like the 
decomposition of a corpse ! — starting more quickly at 
this }3oint, progressing more rapidly at that, and yet 
by gradation only possessing itself of all. Disintegra- 
tion of society, or the aggregate-mats', by the indi- 
vidualization of the unit-man under the brutalizing 
despotism of self ! — process which, once well under 
way, can be arrested, in the very nature of things, 
only by extrinsic force. And when has this ever 
occurred I But, unless arrested, progressing with 
the certainty of fate itself to barbarism as hideous 
in the mysteries of its gloom as is the darkness of 
the grave itself ; — rayless night ! from which the philo- 
sophic historian falls baffled back, and leaves to ad- 
venturous speculation the uncertain attempt to give 
anything of form or fixation to what existed or tran- 
spired within its Cimmerian bosom. And where shall 
speculation seek a foot-hold upon which to catch un- 
less it can be found in possible assimilation to some- 
thing which has come w r ithin sight of our own day \ — 
the condition, for example, of the earth-man of Africa, 
as reported ; or of the root-eating Indian, as we found 
him among the Rocky Mountains ; worshipping no- 
thing, loving nothing — the man but himself, the 
woman loving her offspring as the cow: loves her calf. 
Upon humanity thus brutalized it is altogether clear 
that nothing but brute force — the superior muscle of 
the physical arm, the superior nerve-pluck of the 
material brain — could tell. And this, doubtless, be- 
came active in the robber-knight, w^ho lashed his serf 
or slave into subjection. Does it not seem that, in the 
life of Man, " the two extremes" must always u touch 
each other'' ? For right here, as the effect of a law 
which would appear — at least since the advent of our 
Saviour — to be as inexorable as it is universal ; that, 



8 

wherever two human creatures shall be thrown together 
in the personal relationship of Master and Slave, 
Baron and Vassal, Sovereign and Subject, mutual in- 
terest, sympathy, affection, love will shoot out from 
the one to the other as naturally as grass sprouts from 
the earth : co-operating with yet another law of uni- 
versal potency even yet more assured ; that love — be 
it but the love of a man for his dog! — inasmuch as it 
draws him out of himself, elevates him upon the scale 
of humanity ; right here we are probably contemplat- 
ing the flashing out of the first spark of the Christian 
civilization, at last triumphant, from the detestable 
grave of the elder civilizations. Right here, say I, we 
are standing at the birth-time and the birth place of 
modern European loyalty. Was the first scream 
of the new-born babe announcement to the world that, 
Heaven's government of Man having been made by in- 
carnation of the divine attribute of love personal, 
Earth's government of Man must be quickened by the 
same celestial potency, and must be also personal ? 
Terrific question ! upon which we, Americans, have 
been and still are the most conspicuous experimen- 
ters. 

Needless for me, with such an audience, to follow 
closely the philosophic historian of Modern European 
Civilization for the purpose of showing that, for centu- 
ries of its development, to have withdrawn from it that 
governmental force of which loyalty* was indeed 
the spinal nerve would have been like cutting off from 
nostrils the vitalizing air. And how natural was that 
development? Beginning with the first shootings 
from the earth, which drew the individual into the 
family, to the multitudinous inter-twinings of roots 
and inter-lacings of branches, which drew the family 
into the barony, and the barony into the earldom, and 
the earldom into the dukedom, and the dukedom into 



*Loyalty, generally active with, but clearly distinguishable from. Fealty— 
the one born of the spiritual, the other of the intellectual nature. 



the principality ; giving to the chief or prince of each, 
consecutively, permanent fixation as a personality of 
power in the organism of the State — past, present, 
future — thus making of each living one of them, as it 
were, but a single link in a chain which should draw 
him from the present and out of himself toward the 
past, as it should run glittering back through the gen- 
erations of his ancestry ; which should draw him from 
the present and out of himself toward the future, to 
which he was to transmit it still glittering through 
the generations of his posterity. Was there nothing in 
this i — nothing to expand the reflecting, nothing to 
ennoble the emotional being ) — nothing to fit him to be 
the nucleus or cynosure of social aggregation, itself 
to become a permanent vital of the nation ( — the 
vitals of each such vital to be held together in its own 
development, and all such vitals to be themselves held 
together in the national, by Loyalty — creeping from 
one to the other and over all, like the ivy, but, unlike 
the ivy, bursting out at times into loveliest bloom, and 
shedding the celestial fragrance of self-sacrifice over 
some of the brightest, and yet more of the saddest, 
pages of European History. Was there nothing in 
this I 

I repeat, "How natural was that development?" 
Slow apparently at first, but progressing with ever ac- 
celerated velocity, until it had probably touched the 
perfection of its fruitage in the reproduction in the 
Modern of "the Isles of Greece" in the Ancient 
World.— 

11 The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece, 
Where burning Sappho loved and sung ; 
Where grew the arts of war and peace ;" — 

where the human intellect was probably hypertro- 
phied and the human soul was possibly atrophied ; — 
the very world's radiating centre of learning and of 
pleasure ; of philosophy, always clear — " Oe qui n' est 



10 

pas clair rt est pas Francais /" — and of fashion, 
always fit ; of the tragic and the comic muse — the eagle 
and the humming-bird ; — beautiful, sparkling, kaleid- 
oscopic ; charming, enchanting, ravishing Pakis ! — 
resplendent throne ! upon which, in the historic ejacu- 
lation : "EEtat! Vest moi!"— " The State! It is 
I!" — Louis Quatorze — the Feudal Prince probably 
woke the chord which was to sound his own death- 
knell. Centuries before, across the channel, Magna 
Carta had been plucked from the prince's beard. 
But the Anglo-Saxon is tenacious, is conservative ; 
and seemed but to fondle yet more closely the Feudal 
Passion to his heart. Nay ! true to the instinct, so 
generally ascribed to John Bull, he seems to have 
actually appropriated to himself what belonged to 
modern mankind. At least, so tells us the lexico- 
grapher. Noah Webster, of 1887, giving Loyalty 
as: "Fidelity to a superior," quotes from Trench, 
English lexicographer: " Loyalty, derived from the 
French word Loi, expresses properly that fidelity 
which one owes according to law ; and does not neces- 
sarily include that attachment to the royal person 
which, happily, we in England have been able further 
to throw into the word." 

It remained for George Washington, putting 
aside the Feudal Crown from his own brow, to deper- 
sonate Earth's government of Man, and to fix it in the 
abstract law. Here it is ! — Cold, but pure ! unsym- 
pathetic, but incorruptible ! — a crowned abstraction ! 
holding the sceptre of empire in a pulseless hand — the 
Constitution of the United States ! Sublime 
contemplation !— that the American Citizen is the sub- 
ject only of thought ! that, matters not who or where 
he may be, whether in Washington the nation's Chief, 
or following his plow in the broad blaze of the noon- 
day sun upon the Western prairie, he recognizes no 
material medium between himself and the divine 
source of all thought, of all law, of all truth ; and that,, 
when he bends the knee, he kneels only to his God ! 



11 

Here, indeed, was rebellion triumphant ! Here, 
indeed, had been the very ground-swell of revolution 
which, tearing through the complicated, giant 
growth of nearly a thousand years, had tossed its 
quickening principle, loyalty, upon the top-most 
billow, toward the stars ! But was there no 
"vacuum" left which human nature might "abhor?" 
Was there no danger to society, or the aggregate- 
man, in thus again individualizing the unit-man % — 
so suddenly, so violently, so thoroughly \ — thus cut- 
ting him off from all organic relationship with the 
Past through his ancestry, with the Future through 
his posterity ; from anything on earth to look up to, 
and, obeying, learn to love ; from anything to look 
down upon, and, protecting, come to love \ Thus iso- 
lated in time upon that fugacious point, the Present, 
and in Life within that pitiful infinitesimality, Mm- 
self, wherein did his own personal status differ from 
that of his barbaric sire, at the mediaeval midnight ? 
Was there no danger that the process of reintegration, 
which had commenced at that point, thus arrested by 
revolution, — and who could say, with assurance, not 
prematurely ? — might not be reversed % and disinte- 
gration once again begin in the midst of the modern as 
it had begun in the midst of the ancient civilization? 
Was there no "void" here, which, sooner or later, 
might come to ' ' ache ' ' \ Did the Founders of our Gov- 
ernment nothing to fill it % I can conceive of no answer 
to this question unless it shall be found in a single sen- 
tence which I read from the Constitution of 1786 : " The 
Senators and Representatives before mentioned 
and the Members of the several State Legisla- 
tures, and all Executive and Judicial Officers, 
both of the United States and of the several 
States, shall be bound by oath to support this 
Constitution." 

Is it not altogether clear that Washington and his 
associates must have believed that the point had been 



12 

reached in the development of the Christian Civiliza- 
tion, when it might be safely assumed that loyalty to 
the princes of this world had been merged and lost — 
through the progressive w T ork of the Incarnation — - 
in a broader and a loftier passion ? — to the extent, at 
least, of sustaining them in their practical assumption 
that it might be dispensed with, as a vital potency, in 
the government they were founding? — and that, for 
its successful administration, and for the preserva- 
tion of the Americo-Anglo-Saxon Civilization, they 
might safely rely upon the oath — the oath ! the oath ! ! 
the OATH ! ! ! — to bind the official and the citizen to 
God in heaven, and, upon earth, to the faithful dis- 
charge of duty ? 

The century, over which Mr. Depew directed the 
thought of his audience, began with the instant of 
the first taking of the Oath to support the Consti- 
tution. Wherein did that event fall short of being 
the most significant, practically, in the progressive 
civilization of Man since, at the seat of the Pagan, 
St. Paul declared the God of the Christian? — amid 
the culminations of the intellectual planting the cul- 
mination of the spiritual — the wooden cross of Cal- 
vary fast by the marble temple of Minerva ; to 
which doubtless he pointed when he said : u Whom 
ye ignorantly worship him declare I unto you ; God 
that made the world and all the things therein — seeing 
that he is lord of heaven and earth — dwelleth not in 
temples made with hands ; although he be not far from 
every one of us : For in him we live and move and 
have our being." Did not the Oath — itself, of neces- 
sity, vital with the transcendental meaning of these 
awful words--did not the Oath, also of necessity, 
vitalize the Civil Contract of which itself was to be 
the binding Spiritual Seal with the cognate moral 
law, as taught by our Saviour? and taught, — once 
again of necessity — exhaustively, seeing that Divinity 
would teach nothing itself did not exhaust. Was 



13 

not the lirst taking of the Oath, then, the concentra- 
ting point of interest in the historic picture? — life- 
essence of the subject — which the Occasion claimed 
from Chauncey M. Depew, its Orator? In the in- 
visible presence invoked by the taking of the Oath 
did not the majestic figure of Washington himself 
shrink into comparative nothingness 2 And yet, 
although already " First in \*ar, First in peace, First 
in the hearts of his countrymen," was not yet another 
premiership — of infinitely broader historic signifi- 
cance — descending upon his bowed head, in the in- 
visible halo of new-born Ameetcan loyalty? Was 
not here the exhaustive distinction between the in- 
auguration of an American President — to rule by 
virtue of a Heaven-recorded vow, born of the religion 
of self-crucifixion, and the coronation of a Feudal 
Prince — to reign by force of "the divine right of 
kings," born with, and in, himself ? 

Why, then, was Mr. Depew so reticent about the 
Oath ? Why did he squander his eloquence upon 
names and events already so familiar to the nursery 
and the kinder-garten, and pass so silently by the his- 
toric significance of the first taking of the Oath to 
support the Constitution ? This question I answer 
by propounding another. Think you that Mr. Depew 
was at all concerned as to the significance of taking an 
Oath to do, or not to do, anything, when he uttered 
the words of his oration to which I now beg attention? 

" With the first attempt to exercise national power 
began the duel to the death between State Sovereignty, 
claiming the right to nullify federal laws or secede 
from the Union, and the power of the Republic to 
command the resources of the country to enforce its 
authority and protect its life. It was the beginning 
of the sixty years' war for the Constitution and the 
nation. It seared consciences, degraded politics, 
destroyed parties, ruined statesmen, and retarded the 
advance and development of the country ; it sacrificed 



14 

hundreds of thousands of precious lives, and squan- 
dered thousands of millions of money ; it desolated 
the fairest portion of the land, and carried mourning 
into every home, North and South, but it ended at 
Appomattox in the absolute triumph of the Republic. 

"Posterity owes to Washington's administration the 
policy and measures, the force and direction which 
made possible this glorious result. * * * Hamil- 
ton' s marvelous versatility and genius designed the 
armory and the weapons for the promotion of national 
power and greatness, but Washington's steady sup- 
port carried him through. * * * Upon the plan 
marked out by the Constitution this great architect 
with unfailing faith and unfaltering courage builded 
the Republic. He gave to the government the princi- 
ples of action and sources of power which carried it 
successfully through the war with Great Britain in 
1812 and Mexico in 1848, which enabled Jackson to 
defeat nullification, and recruited and equipped mil- 
lions of men for Lincoln, and justified and sustained 
his Proclamation of Emancipation." — Orations and 
After Dinner Speeches of Chauncey M. Depeic, pp. 
%5, 26, 27. 

Through the thin, phosphorescent glamour of Mr. 
Depew's rhetoric who, by possibility, can fail to detect 
his attempt to substitute for the truth of history a 
fabrication of his own brain, as notably imbecile as it 
was transparently false ? ■ ' Imbecile" ? We need but 
confront it with one majestic memory. Upon whose 
shoulders descended the mantle of Hamilton, if not 
upon Webster's % Along-protracted "war" did in- 
deed begin before Washington's administration ended. 
Originating with the Expounders, who naturally 
pressed close upon the Founders, of the Constitution ; 
bequeathed by Jeffekson, leader of the strict, and by 
Hamilton, leader of the liberal constructionists, to 
their respective successors, for a generation — nay, 
longer ! — it filled the American Capitol with a per- 



15 

petual blaze of intellectual light, absolutely unrivaled 
in Roman Senate, British Parliament, or French 
National Assembly. And who was it that sprang — 
young' giant ! — to the head of the Federal Force i — 
pre-eminent, paling in the comparison even the his- 
toric fame of Hamilton" himself — who was it? if not 
Daniel Webster, sometime called the u Godlike?" 
This question I submit for answer to Mr. Depew. 
Hear him ! 

"But, at the critical period when the popularity, 
courage and audacity of General Jackson were almost 
the sole hope of nationality, Webster delivered in 
the Senate a speech unequaled in the annals of elo- 
quence for its immediate effects and lasting results. 
The appeal of Demosthenes to the Athenian democ- 
racy, the denunciations of Cicero against the conspir- 
acies of Cataline, the passionate outcry of Mirabeau 
pending the French revolution, the warnings of Chat- 
ham in the British Parliament, the fervor of Patrick 
Henry for independence, were of temporary interest, 
and yielded feeble results, compared with the tremen- 
dous consequences of this mighty utterance. 

"It broke the spell of supreme loyalty to the State, 
and created an unquenchable and resistless patriotism 
for the United States. It appeared in the school 
books, and, by declaiming glowing extracts therefrom, 
the juvenile orators of that and succeeding genera- 
tions won prizes at academic exhibitions and in mimic 
congresses. Children educated parents, and the pride 
of the fathers and the kindled imaginations of the 
sons united them in a noble ideal of the great Repub- 
lic. No subsequent patriotic oration met the require- 
ments of any public occasion, great or small, which 
did not breathe the sentiment of 'liberty and union, 
now and forever, one and inseparable !' " — Idem. pp. 

Who of us would suppress or enfeeble one word of 
this panegyric ? Where breathes the true Southron 



16 

who would not be quick to recognize with patriotic 
pride the assimilation of the American Webster, 
among the orators, to the American Niagaka, among 
the cataracts of Earth ? And yet but partial justice 
would be done his memory did we not further insist 
that he rose to, and still occupies, an eminence, as far 
above the plane of mere earthly oratory as the spiritual 
swells beyond and above the intellectual world. But 
here we are forced into antagonism with a portion of 
his own immediate people of the North — conspicuous 
among them the Orator of the Hundredth Anniversary 
of the Inauguration of President Washington ; who 
availed himself of the opportunity, officially given 
him, to prostitute a national occasion to truth-sacri- 
ficing sectional use ; thereby drawing an impassable 
line of demarcation between himself and Daniel 
Webster. 

To enable us to comprehend how broad and deep it 
is we must needs contemplate for a few moments the 
career of the latter in companionship with the only 
two Americans of his day, who — after William H. 
Crawford had been prematurely stricken down by 
paralysis — were at all comparable with him. And 
into what heroic proportions had the three risen, 
almost simultaneously, above the surges of that front 
battle-field of American Ambitions, the Federal Con- 
gress ? — attracting to themselves — far more legitimately 
than could the great Napoleon place upon his own 
head the crown which he picked up from the street ; 
attracting to themselves — the work of individualiza- 
tion had not yet progressed too far for that ! — each 
from his own section, a fervor of personal devotion 
in all essentials identical with the loyalty paid to 
the Feudal Prince of the olden time : nay ! exercising 
through it an absolutism of the one-man power quite 
unattainable by the modern Cjesar ! For, while in 
Russia the Czar may indeed fully embody the one- 
man will in his edict, it by far too often occurs that he 



17 

must bring his bayonet to bear upon the physical, to 
constrain the reflecting, subject to obedience ; whereas 
in South Carolina, Calhoun, acting directly upon 
the reflecting, never failed to constrain the physical, 
man of his dominant party to vote his will. So Clay 
in Kentucky ; so, for awhile, Webster in Massa- 
chusetts. And time was — who with assurance can 
gainsay it? — when, had the three conspired for an end 
of ambition common to them all, they might have 
supplanted the Constitutional Government of Wash- 
ington with a Triumvirate of their own. But such 
possibility could never have occurred to either of 
them, or, indeed, to. any intelligent American of their 
day ; for the simple reason that not one of the three, 
in his life-long career, had given slightest ground for 
suspicion that he could be more recreant to the Oath 
to support the Constitution — which held him to 
the invisible center of the moral universe — than could 
the Earth itself be recreant to the law of gravity 
which holds it to the Sun. Not thus, however, with 
a fourth character unhappily also historic ! Raised 
by the accident of conflict between CLAY r , the States- 
man, and Jackson, the Soldier, of the West, not so 
far above his great cotemporaries in place as he was 
beneath them in the grander elements of moral and 
intellectual force ; all aflame with that hell-born thirst, 
which never fails to follow the alcoholic draught of 
gratified ambition, and always inversely proportionate 
to the moral dimensions of the drinker, he descended 
from the Presidential Chair to desecrate the House of 
Representatives by directing from its floor against the 
Constitution, which he, in common wi.th all its mem- 
bers, had taken the Oath to support, that long-con- 
tinued and desperately resisted onslaught, for which 
Mr. Depew undertook to substitute the flimsy figment 
of his own brain ; and to the initiation of which Wm. 
H. Seward, announcing from the already desecrated 
steps of Faneuil Hall the grand purpose of the 



18 

Republican Party in the political campaign then pro- 
gressing — to close in the de facto election of Presi- 
dent Lincoln — used the words which will now be 
kindly read : 

"In response to the enthusiastic cheers of the peo- 
ple, Mr. Seward made a speech from which we make 
the following impressive and significant extracts. 
After relating how he had early derived his political 
principles and sentiments from the Massachusetts 
school, under the teachings of the immortal " Sage of 
Quincy ", he proceeds as follows : 

" I know that citizens of Massachusetts, as well as 
citizens of other States, have attempted to drive the 
disciples of that illustrious teacher from their policy. 
But it is to-night that I am free to confess that when- 
ever any man, wherever he might be found, whether 
he was of Northern or Southern birth, whether he was 
of the " solid men of Boston ", or of the light men of 
Mississippi, have assailed me for the maintenance of 
those doctrines, I have sought to commune with his 
spirit, and to learn from him whether the thing in 
which I was engaged was well and worthily done. 
What a commentary upon the wisdom of man is given 
in this single fact, that fifteen years only after the 
death of John Quincy Adams, the people of the United 
States, who hurled him from power and from place, 
are calling to the head of the nation, to the very seat, 
from which he was expelled, Abraham Lincoln, whose 
claim to that seat is that he confesses the obligation 
of that higher law which the Sage of Quincy pro- 
claimed, and that he avows himself for weal or woe, 
for life or death, a soldier on the side of freedom in 
the irrepressible conflict between freedom and slavery. 
Tims, gentlemen, is my simple confession. I desire 
now, only to say to you that you have arrived at the 
last stage of this conflict before you reach the triumph 
which is to inaugurate this great policy into the gov- 
ernment of the United States." — The Crisis. What is 
Resistance ? pp. %5, 26. 



19 

Introduced with the introduction of Abolition Peti- 
tions into Congress by Adams ; thus proclaimed by 
Seward to be "irrepressible conflict between Free- 
dom and Slavery/ 5 in Boston — Boston ! ! whose peo- 
ple had been so conspicuously active in fastening upon 
the vital organisms of the Southern States that Insti- 
tution,* to which the generic name of " Slavery," as 
contra-distinguished from " Freedom," was cunningly 
given by the unscrupulous demagogue — both Adams 
and Seward openly avowing allegiance to " Law 
Higher" than the Constitution, which each of them 
had reapeatedly taken the Oath to support — this 
movement, thus initiated, must live in American His- 
tory, whenever and wherever it shall be truthfully 
written and intelligently read, as the "war" which 
4 'seared consciences, degraded politics, destroyed 
parties, ruined statesmen, and retarded the advance 
and development of the country" : manufactured, 
from the elements of sectional prejudice, jealousy and 
self-sufficient fanaticism, throughout the entire East- 
ern, Northern and Northwestern States, that gigantic 
Public Opinion — violently aggressive from the first, 
frenzied into demoniac fury toward the last — which 
might well wear the name in history of Grand Akmy 
of the Higher Law ; generally commanded, never 
effectively resisted, by State officials — Governors, 
Legislators, Judges — each of whom held place upon 
his Oath taken to support the Constitution, and 
which absolutely nullified those supremely vital pro- 
visions of it, perfected by its framers into clear, ex- 
plicit law, purposely that it might go to the People 
direct from the Constitution — to exact everywhere 
obedience the most implicit, enforcement the most 
loyal, as being solemn Treaty Stipulations between 
still existing Sovereignties, without which the Union 
could not have been formed, and upon the faithful 
maintenance of which only could it rightfully continue 



♦See Lecture on »■ the Wanderer Case," by H. R. Jackson. 



20 

to exist : dictated and secured those legislative enact- 
ments, known as "Personal Liberty Laws," which 
made it crime against the sovereignty of the State to 
attempt to enforce upon its soil the Federal Consti- 
tution, or Federal Laws enacted to " support" it 
where it could no longer, because of revolutionary re- 
sistance, support itself : took de facto possession of the 
Electoral College of 1860 by force of a majority com- 
posed almost wholly of delegates from these same 
States, while the flag of Rebellion was thus floating 
from the capitol of each — as though it might be pos- 
sible for a State to be de facto out of the Union, for 
the purpose of resisting its law^s, and simultaneously 
de jure in the Union, for the purpose of making a 
President; " majority", too, which represented only 
a minority of the American People — a decisive ma- 
jority of whom had expressed, through the ballot-box 
in the presidential election, antagonism to Seward 
and his revolutionary faction : inaugurated the presi- 
dent elect of a body thus composed and controlled, in 
utter disregard of the will of the People thus made 
manifest : and so usurped the government of the 
United States ; its name, prestige and capital ; its army, 
navy and illimitable resources, to concentrate and 
wield them all against States w T hose people had ahvays 
been loyal to the Union under the 'Constitution — 
thereby most unrighteously forcing them into a des- 
perately unequal conflict to preserve for their children 
the civilization and institutions bequeathed to them 
by their fathers, under security of an oath-sealed 
compact with States which were now trampling it 
under foot, to degrade and destroy them. This w T as 
indeed the "war" which "sacrificed hundreds of 
thousands of precious lives, and squandered thousands 
of millions of money : desolated the fairest portion of 
the land, and carried mourning into every home 
North and South": followed the track of barbaric 
Sherman's devastating armies with the wrongs, op- 



21 

pressions and never-to-be-niimbered infamies of Re- 
construction, under the de facto consulate of the 
Carpet-Bagger and Scalawag: wrenched English 
words from their legitimate application — calling the 
historically grand and glorious self-defense of the 
Confederate States, " the Great Rebellion"; 
naming him " traitor" who had been true to his man- 
hood, and resisted the Higher Law; him " rebel" 
who had been true to his oath, and supported the 
Constitution : cut, with the sword of force, into the 
Constitution itself that provision — still remaining 
there to scar it ! — which gave all offices of honor and 
emolument to the supporters of the Higher Law, and 
destituted its own devoted supporters — upon the 
ground of having been false to the oath to support 
the Constitution — of any right whatsoever, as 
though it might be possible to Const itut ionize into 
the Truth of History an everywhere intrinsically 
self-revealing lie : sought to put to shame the true, 
brave people whose homes it had desolated by fetter- 
ing with irons their already incarcerated Chief, as 
though he were a common and meanly dangerous 
malefactor, and then withheld from him that trium- 
phant vindication in history which all intelligent men 
knew must certainly result from any trial at all ; and, 
finally, attempted to substitute, throughout that section 
which had given George Washington to mankind, 
for the distinctive American Loyalty first breathed 
by his pure lips — synonymous, the wide- world over, 
with Truth itself — that historic music of two words, 
t% truly loyaV\ so potert in the work of fraud, op- 
pression and plunder on the lip of Carpet-Bagger 
and Scalawag ; but from the insidiously amicable 
approach of which to himself the true American 
everywhere shrank, as shrinks the most delicate of 
women from the foulest insect that drones through the 
fetid air of night. 



22 

From the plane of Washington, Jefferson, Ham- 
ilton — Founders ; from the level of Webster, Clay, 
Calhoun — Expounders, of the Constitution, what 
a fall was here, my countrymen ! And could it be 
within the range of possibility conceivable ttett one 
man, so inferior to either of them, should have the 
power to raise, and — living and dead— to give direc- 
tion to, the storm which was thus to dash the elabo- 
rated work of them all into monumental wreck? — 
precipitating upon the American People the ultimate 
test of u the Great American Experiment" of Man's 
capacity for self-government, in the only crucial ques- 
tion practically possible : Shall the Constitution 
stand, as abstract law can only stand, upon implicit 
obedience ? or, by one act of rebellious disobedience 
uncontroled, stabbed-like Cesar to the heart, shall it 
fall beneath the feet of mere brute force — to be tram- 
pled upon at pleasure ? 

As circumstance, more x )0 tent than merit in the 
man, had made Adams President, so circumstance was 
again at hand to supply him with extrinsic force for 
this work of transcendent mischief. It so chanced 
that, in prosecuting his own ambitious ends, he met a 
dire need — growing from year to year more and more 
dire — of the younger ambitions, which were revealing 
themselves in all sections of the country with phenome- 
nal rapidity. I say " phenomenal^ because it resulted 
from a phenomenon characteristic of the early develop- 
ment of the Americo-English civilization. Pre-ex- 
isting history taught that the habits of thought and 
action with resulting and dependent social organisms 
of the Anglo-Saxon, would survive the revolution of 
1776, for lengths of time as variant as themselves. It 
did not teach that one of the two master passions of the 
human soul, let fully loose upon the breathing world 
by revolutionary demolition of all restraining Feudal 
bars, would instantly begin, and prosecute with a 
rapidity of achievement absolutely unprecedented, its 



23 

formidable work: and that, while it would be alto- 
gether natural, on the one hand, for President 
Washington, in his daily walk around Philadelphia, 

to stride like a Feudal Prince, followed at ten paces 
with military precision by an Aide in dashing military 
garb, it would be quite as natural, on the other hand, 
but two generations later — during that interval of pal- 
pitation between the election and the inauguration of 
President Lixcolx — for a Georgia Captain, standing 
with his company in amicable line deployed before 
the urchins of a u ragged-school" upon Long Island, 
to exclaim, "My boys! what a glorious country is 
ours ! Who can tell but that one of you may be Pres- 
ident of the United States ( " 

Universal development of ambition ! — that exhaust- 
ive concentration of self-assertion, thus culminating 
in the thought of president-making — was this, then, 
the first practical effect of the revolution of " Seventy - 
Six" distinctly to reveal itself? Such, indeed, had 
rapidly become the universal lesson ; taught by the 
proud mother to the eagerly listening boy at her knee; 
by the preceptor, tempting Brown, as he took his place 
above Black in the spelling class, to find pleasure in 
what was giving to another pain — hypertrophy of the 
intellect ! atrophy of the soul ! thus begun even in the 
kinder-garten ! Such had been the lesson taught by 
the Fourth of July orator everywhere ; selecting for 
his text that questionable generalization of the Declar- 
ation of Independence, "All men are born equal,*' 
and doing it down in the crucible of his own deductive 
philosophy with that other generalization, ''the un- 
alienable right'' to " the pursuit of happiness ;" and 
precipitating therefrom in each American Citizen a 
wereign," born with ;; the divine right of kings'' 
to determine for himself what ** happiness'' is, and 
to "pursue" it by getting above his ''equals." 

Was it indeed possible that, so immediately after 
the profoundly-teaching inauguration of their First 



24 

President, the entire American People, with an unan- 
imity of thought and action never to be exceeded, had 
set themselves to the suicidal work of thus scattering 
broad-cast over their country the seed of self-asser- 
tion, the seed of barbarizing individualization, the 
the very seed of Hell itself ? What wonder that, in the 
lapse of a single generation, there should appear a 
swarm multitudinous — to be numbered only by the 
conscientious census-taker — resembling by far too 
closely that other swarm which periodically emerges 
from the earth to restore to the forest in mid-summer 
its wintry aspect, — crawling along the surface, each 
"born equal" to his neighbor and to that extent 
indeed a "sovereign;" asserting his "unalienable 
right" to u the pursuit of happiness" in getting above 
his "equals," by mounting the first upright thing he 
meets ; be it an elm, the foliage reached — to feed and 
fatten there ; be it a bald-headed post, the top attained, 
stretching a lean, lank form into vacancy, always up- 
ward ! to perish there — a veritable worm "Excel- 
sior!" 

The organism of the British Parliament surviving in 
the American Congress, it was but natural that the 
long-established habit of Anglo-Saxon thought should 
fasten the eye of political ambition upon the latter ; 
in utter disregard of the fact, so vital to a constitu- 
tional government of the American Union, that each 
State legislature must bear to the Federal the relation- 
ship borne by a court of original and general to a court 
of delegated and limited jurisdiction; or, speaking 
more directly, the relationship borne by the legislature 
of one of a Nation of Sovereignties to the legislature 
of an agency created by and common to them all ; but 
wholly destitute of sovereignty original in itself. And 
that, therefore, while the assimilation of the former to 
the British Parliament might be complete, that of the 
latter must, in the nature of things, be partial ; that, 
immaterial how extensive the territory of the Union, 



JT 



26 

how vast or complicated the machinery needful for its 
government, that government, as constituted ! could 
not directly and fully touch one American citizen as 
touches the British government all British subjects, 
as touches each State government its every citizen ; 
and that hence the main life of the People lay beyond 
the sphere of its action. Among the Founders of the 
Constitution Patrick Henry seems to have stood 
alone in his active appreciation of the necessity of 
keeping this vital truth practically manifest. Could 
he have given direction to American ambition, divert- 
ing it from the territorially broader, but comparatively 
shallow, field of Federal Politics, to the development of 
the State, under wise and effective " Home-Rule," the 
immediate cause of the now historic War between the 
States could not have been engendered. But, as 
through Parliament had lain for generations the 
avenue to the British Premiership, it was naturally 
assumed that so through Congress must lie the high- 
way to the American Presidency ; and Congress pre- 
cipitately became "the front battle-field of American 
Ambitions." 

Oratory is the art of revolutionary epochs. The 
spirit of the American Revolution made itself first heard 
in the British Parliament. Who can have failed to 
recognize in the eloquence of Patrick Henry the im- 
press of Lord Chatham's? In rousing the American 
People to Revolution the indispensable trio — 
"speaker, audience and subject" — everywhere 
grouped themselves together for the generation of elo- 
quence. Independence achieved, there still remained 
work for Statesmen, and for Orators, in the founding 
of the Constitution and the Union. And this was 
quickly followed by the epoch of Construction, the 
epoch of Webster, Clay and Calhoun, and those efful- 
gent galaxies which the opportunities of the Time 
clustered round the three great central orbs ; when ex- 
President Adams took his seat in the House of Repre- 



26 

sentatives. Oratory, monopolizing the art-passion and 
art-taste of the American People, had now fully pos- 
sessed itself of the schools ; and was everywhere sedu- 
ously taugh t. It is but fair to assume that for the young 
political aspirants who were now beginning to come to 
the Federal Capitol, all aglow with fc c the touch of the 
live coal from" their " altars," the mere matter of 
President-making did not wear a superlatively attrac- 
tive face. What part in the world's life was a mere 
President to play ? The normal career of a Roman 
Emperor was life-long. Every pen that should write 
the history of his day must needs write his biography ; 
for that was actually the history of the world. And, 
yet, what school-boy's memory strong enough to carry 
the listed names of the Roman Emperors ? How 
widely different with the Demostheneses, the Ciceros, 
the Chathams of the Past. Here, indeed, were names 
that could not die. They come next to the Alexan- 
ders, the Caesars, and the Bonapartes. They stand, 
with the Homers, Virgils and Shakspeares, among the 
quickeners of immortal thought— God's vicegerents 
upon earth — to be recognized forever. 

With each succeeding Congress the number of such 
aspirants was increasing, and, ere the fifth decade had 
been reached, in Congress and in country it was 
" legion." The rapid development of newspaper life 
had expanded their ' ' audience ' ' into ' ' The Public. ' ' 
But the third essential for eloquence, " the subject", 
was rapidly perishing. The heroic days of the 
world-startling Revolution were now growing distant. 
The work of the Fourth of July orator had been over- 
done. The field of Constitutional Construction, once 
so abounding, had been swept by the great scythes of 
the masters ; these had left but little for the gleaner. 
In truth, the point was being rapidly neared when the 
professional Federal statesman must be remitted to 
his normal occupation — president-making and meting 
out "the spoils to the victors." "The days of" elo- 
quence were about to be 



27 

. Here it was the tempter found his opportunity. 
Beyond the Constitution lay other fields — unlimited, 
illimitable — where the harvest was rich and the scythe 
had never swept. To make entrance into them : "Hie 
labor lioc opus eraty But to do this meant to depose 
the Constitution ; and he — lineal successor of Wash- 
ington — had taken the oath to support the Constitu- 
tion. Simple thing enough, perhaps, to part company 
with his conscience ! but where was he to find a ful- 
crum upon which to plant the lever fit for his work? 
He found it in an assumption as false to history as he 
was false to truth and to duty; namely, that " the 
right of subject to petition sovereign" was one of 
those "rights' 3 proclaimed by the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence to be "unalienable," and therefore law 
higher than the Constitution itself ; "right," indeed, 
which had been wrung by the Barons from King John 
in Magna Charta, and had been made supremely vital 
by it and by all the English Bills of Right which con- 
stitute with it the "Bible of Anglo-Saxon Liberty." 
Is it not "passing strange" that, in all the discus- 
sions of the subject-matter of the presentation of Abo- 
lition Petitions, the absolute falsity of this assump- 
tion does not seem to have provoked a comment, And 
yet it was manifest, not only in the nature of things, 
but in the words of the Constitution itself. In the 
nature of things — for the "right of subject to petition 
sovereign' ' was supremely vital in the theory of the 
patriarchal — first form of government known to " Ag- 
gregate-man." "What, then, was secured by Magna 
Charta and the Bills of Right?" does any one in- 
quire i Let the Constitution itself answer ! 

"Congress shall make no law abridging the right of 
the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the 
government for a redress of grievances." — U. S. Con- 
stitution. Amendments, Article 1. 

The word "assemble" is principal, the word "peti- 
tion ' ' is accessory ; the one is everything, the other 



28 

absolutely nothing, in the American Constitution and 
in all the English Bills of Right. Theoretically the 
inborn " right of subject to petition sovereign" must 
be recognized, above all other governments, by the 
most despotic — the patriarchal! — but the child must 
approach the parent quite alone. The assemblage of 
the many is the chronic terror of the one-man power. 
Now, of all peoples on earth the Abolitionists were 
in the fullest enjoyment of the right to " assemble," 
when Adams and his Lieutenant-Generals, as well 
without as within the Federal Capitol, were thun- 
dering to the world the great wrong done them — 
first, in not "receiving 5 ' their " Petitions," and, sec- 
ondly, in simply " laying them on the table." By 
treasonable abuse of the "right" to "assemble" they 
were rousing the passions of the people against the 
Constitution, and organizing under the Highee Law 
that Public Opinion which finally usurped the Fed- 
eral Government and deluged the Southern States in 
blood. # 

Adams having selected for the first alignment of his 
forces a ground so absolutely untenable, the question 
must always present itself : Why was it not at once 
stricken from beneath him ? Why was not the final issue 
then made % Did not the crisis call for application of 
the principle : Seconds may be worth more than regi- 
ments ? What other answer can be given than that 
the tempter had tempted too wisely ? The pabulum 
for eloquence was too rich and savory to be rejected ! 
"The wish being father to the thought" easy, doubt- 
less, became the task of persuading oneself that the 
mere receipt of petitions, "to be laid upon the table," 
could scarcely work serious harm to the Republic. 
And yet, looking to the imperial dignity of the Fed- 
eral Constitution, the crime of all most immediately 
dangerous to government, was being covertly commit- 
ted ; crime, made subject in all European communi- 
ties to punishment the most instantaneous and con- 



29 

dign — the crime of "Lese-Majeste." So Adams, 
bringing the Constitution into contempt at the 
North, and subjecting the South to rudest assault in 
the tenderest of her vitals, made an intensely emo- 
tional subject for the orator with the " cacoethes 
loquendV upon him, both South and North. Only 
with this explanation, as it seems to me, will the phi- 
losophic historian of the future be enabled to compre- 
hend how, with powers so inferior to those of his great 
contemporaries, and venturing upon his work with so 
fragile an instrument, he could have overwhelmed the 
combined efforts of them all and accomplished an end 
of mischief so colossal. 

They and he had passed from the stage of action 
before the war of words attained its most formidable 
proportions and began to merge itself in the war be- 
tween the States. But the Congress of 1850 will be 
always memorable from the fact that it grouped Clay, 
Webster and Calhoun — each of whom, however widely 
they may have differed from time to time upon politi- 
cal questions, had been true throughout to the noble 
utterance of the first — "I had rather be right than 
President" — against the rapidly developing revolu- 
tionary spirit of the North and in evoking from each 
of the three a forensic master-piece of his life. Mr. 
Benton, in his " Thirty Years in the Senate," says that 
the peroration of Mr. Webster's speech, upon Foote's 
Resolutions, in answer to Hayne, surpassed anything 
in ancient or modern eloquence. It was the effect 
of Adams' work that gave to his speech of 1850, 
as compared even with it, a transcendent sub- 
limity. Before his death, in 1848, Adams had suc- 
ceeded in sectionalizing the Whig party — at least in 
New England. Hence the position of Webster, when, 
in 1850, he stood in line with Clay and Calhoun, dif- 
fered in one respect u toto ccelo" from theirs. Each 
of the latter was supported — never so fervently, never 
more unanimously — by his own section, by his own con- 



30 

stituents. But how was it with Webster ? I myself re- 
member to have heard at the time that, on the evening 
before the delivery of that speech, he called in person 
upon every Whig Senator and Representative from 
IsTew England but to find that, when he should take 
his stand on the morrow, he would stand alone. I 
here solicit your attention to an extract from that 
most masterly production of the Southern Pen — Mr. 
Stephens' War between the States — (See Vol. 1, p.p. 
405, 406, 407.) — as giving a just estimate of his heroic 
patriotism at that crisis. 

u He was too great a man and had too great an in- 
tellect not to see the truth when it was p resented ; 
and he was too honest and too patriotic a man not to 
proclaim a truth, when he saw it, to an unwilling 
people. In this quality of moral greatness I often 
thought Mr. Webster had the advantage of his great 
contemporaries, Messrs. Clay and Calhoun. Not that 
I would be understood as saying that they w^ere not 
men of great moral courage, for both of them showed 
this high quality in many instances, but that they 
never gave the world such striking exhibitions of it as 
he did. It was the glory of his life that his was put 
to a test in this particular ; that theirs never was. On 
no occasion that I am aware of did Mr. Clay ever take 
a position which he did not know that he would be 
sustained in by the people of Kentucky. So with Mr. 
Calhoun, as to South Carolina. I do not say that 
they might not have done it, if a sense of duty had re- 
quired it, but they were either so fortunate or so un- 
fortunate as never to have had that issue presented to 
them. Webster, on the contrary, often passed this 
ordeal ; and that he passed it with unflinching firm- 
ness is one of the grandest features in the general 
grandeur of his character. 

"One of the highest exhibitions of the moral sub- 
lime the world ever witnessed was that of Daniel 
Webster, when, on an open barouche in the streets of 



31 

Boston, he proclaimed, in substance, to a vast assem- 
bly of his constituents — unwilling hearers — that ' they 
had conquered an uncongenial clime ; they had con- 
quered a sterile soil ; they had conquered the winds 
and currents of the ocean ; they had conquered most 
of the elements of nature ; but they must yet learn 
to conquer their prejudices.' It was an exhibition of 
moral grandeur surpassing that of Aristides when he 
said, ' 0, Athenians what Themistocles recommends 
would be greatly to your interests, but it would be 
unjust.'" — A. H. Stephens. The War between the 
States. Vol. 1. Pages 1+05, Jfi6, AG7. 

Two brief passages will now be read from Mr. Web- 
ster's speech of 1850. 

"Now, sir, this prejudice, created by the incessant 
action on the public mind of abolition societies, abo- 
lition presses, and abolition lecturers, has grown very 
strong. No drum-head in the longest day' s march was 
ever more incessantly beaten and smitten than public 
sentiment in the North has been, every month, and 
day, and hour, by the din, and roll, and rub-a-dub of 
abolition writers and abolition lecturers. That it is 
which has created the prejudice. 

u Sir, the principle of the restitution of runaway 
slaves is not objectionable unless the Constitution is 
objectionable. If the Constitution is right in that re- 
spect the principle is right, and the law for carrying it 
into effect is right. If that be so, and if there is no 
abuse of the right under law of Congress, or any other 
law, then what is there to complain of ? 

" Before I pass from this subject, sir, I will say that 
what seems extraordinary is that this principle of res- 
titution which has existed in the country for more 
than two hundred years without complaint, sometimes 
as a matter of agreement between the North and South, 
and sometimes as a matter of comity, should all at 
once, and after the length of time I have mentioned, 
become a subject of excitement. 



32 

"I mean to stand upon the Constitution. I need no 
other platform. I shall know but one country. The 
ends I aim at shall be my country's, my God's, and 
Truth's. I was born an American, I will live an Amer- 
ican ; I shall die an American ; and I intend to per- 
form the duties incumbent upon me in that character 
to the end of my career. I mean to do this, with ab- 
solute disregard of personal consequences. What are 
personal consequences ? What is the individual man, 
with all the good or evil which may betide him, in 
comparison with the good or evil which may befall a 
great country in a crisis like this, and in the midst of 
great transactions which concern that country's fate? 
Let the consequences be what they will, I am careless. 
No man can suffer too much and no man can fall too 
soon, if he suffer or if he fall in defence of the liber- 
ties and Constitution of his country." — The Works of 
Daniel Webster. Vol. 5, p.p. 433, 1&7. 

Alfred the Great was "Conditor" Edward the 
Confessor " Mestitutor" of the " British Constitu- 
tion." All men will agree that to Washington be- 
longs the title of " Founder" of the American. But, 
thanks be to the God of Nations ! the " American Con- 
stitution" has needed no u Restorer." It had intrin- 
sic power of its own to restore itself. But, if Wash- 
ington is to live in history as Founder, must not all 
reflecting men behold in Webster, standing close by 
his side, the historic Expounder of the Federal 
Constitution? And is it making too heavy a draft 
upon the imagination to suppose that, as he uttered 
the words last read — so grandly potent in their sim- 
plicity — the transcendent New Englander may — to 
use his own inimitable imagery — have "felt the great 
arm" of the Southron "lean upon" him "for 
support ' ' \ 

The last quotations, however, were not his last utter- 
ances at the crisis, and upon the subject-matter, which 
involved the life of the Union. At Capon Springs, 



33 

Virginia, in 1851, lie used the explicit and emphatic 
words which will now be read. 

"How absurd it is to suppose that when different 
parties enter into a compact for certain purposes, 
either can disregard any one provision, and expect, 
nevertheless, the other to observe the rest. I intend, 
for one, to regard, and maintain, and carry out, to the 
fullest extent, the Constitution of the United States, 
which I have sworn to support, in all its parts and all 
its provisions. It is written in the Constitution : 

4 No person held to service or labor in one State 
under the laws thereof and escaping into another, 
shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, 
be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be 
delivered up on claim of the party to whom such 
labor or service may be due.' 

" That is as much a part of the Constitution as any 
other, and as equally binding and obligatory as any 
other on all men, public or private. 

"I have not hesitated to say, and I repeat, that if the 
Northern States refuse, wilfully and deliberately, to 
carry into effect that part of the Constitution which 
respects the restoration of fugitive slaves, and Con- 
gress provide no remedy, the South would not longer 
be bound to observe the compact. A bargain cannot . 
be broken on one side and still bind the other side. 

1 ' I am as ready to fight and fall for the Constitutional 
rights of Virginia as I am for those of Massachu- 
setts." — Mr. Webster's Speech at Capon Sgrings, Vir- 
ginia, June £8th, 1851. 

Who will question that Daniel Webster, from the 
loftiest point of view, was by far the most effective ad- 
vocate of that construction of the Federal Constitu- 
tion which called the Confederate States into being, 
and placed their armies in the field ; or that he was 
the first self -devoting champion to "suffer" and to 
"fall" in defence of the now sometimes called "Lost 
Cause." There moves not upon the face of earth, 

8 



34 

there sleeps not in her bosom, one mutilated or slaugh- 
tered Confederate Soldier who may not truthfully ex- 
claim in his thought, or in his dream : I, too, like 
Webster, " suffered "; I, too, like Webster, "fell, in 
defence of the liberties and Constitution of my 
country !" The glory of Thermopylae is not to Xerxes 
and his million ; it is to Leonidas and his three hun- 
dred. 

Might it not be wise for Mr. Depew, whose " tongue" 
so frequently does "drop manna," to reconcile his 
eloquent expression of admiration for Daniel Web- 
ster with his attempt "to make the worse appear the 
better cause" in his "Oration on the hundredth an- 
niversary of the Inauguration of President Washing- 
ton." Until this shall be done, the question will re- 
main unanswered, whether, at the close of that historic 
address, the ghost of Webster would have been more 
acceptable to him than was Banquo's ghost to Mac- 
beth at the supper- table ; or than would have been the 
ghost of the murdered Lincoln to Judge- Advocate Holt, 
immediately after the execution of Mrs. Surratt. 

And, further, might it not be well for him to recon- 
cile its significance with the views of Mr. Alexander 
Johnston — surely as devoted a Northerner and mem- 
ber of the Republican Party as Mr. Depew himself — 
views obviously wrung by sheer force of truth from a 
conscientious man — to which I now pray special atten- 
tion? 

" The objection to the constitutionality of the fugi- 
tive slave law is, in brief, that the rendition of fugi- 
tive slaves, as well as of fugitives from justice, was an 
obligation imposed by the Constitution upon the 
States ; and that the federal government, which has 
never attempted to give the law in the latter case, had 
no more right to do so in the former. This opinion, 
however, has against it the unanimous opinion of the 
Supreme Court in the case of Ableman vs. Booth, cited 
below. But there is absolutely no legal excuse for the 



35 

personal liberty laws. If the rendition of fugitive 
slaves was a federal obligation, the personal liberty 
laws were in flat disobedience to law ; if the obliga- 
tion was upon -the States, they were a gross breach of 
good faith, for they were intended, and operated, to 
prevent rendition ; and in either case they were in 
violation of the Constitution, which the State legisla- 
tors themselves were sworn to support. The dilemma 
is so inevitable that only the pressure of an intense 
and natural horror of surrendering to slavery a man 
who had escaped from it, or who had never been sub- 
ject to it, can palliate the passage of the laws in ques- 
tion. Plainly, the people, in adopting the fugitive 
slave clause of the Constitution, had assumed an obli- 
gation which it was not possible to fulfill. The 
writer's own belief that the obligation of rendition was 
upon the States alone, has prevented him from class- 
ing the personal liberty laws under nullification." — 
Cyclopoedia of Political Science, Political Economy 
and United States History. Vol. 3d, p. 163. 

Finally, would not the American People of the 
present day also turn with interest and profit to an ex- 
pression of the views now entertained by both Mr. 
Depew and Mr. Johnston of Whittier's 

Poem on Webster I 

" So fallen ! so lost ! the light withdrawn 

Which once he wore ! 
The glory from his grey hairs gone 

For evermore ! 

Revile him not, — the Tempter hath 

A snare for all ; 
And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath, 

Befit his fall. 

O dumb be passion's stormy rage, 

When he, who might 
Have lighted up and led his age, 

Falls back in night. 



36 

Scorn ! would the angels laugh, to mark 

A bright soul driven 
Fiend-goaded down the endless dark 

From hope and heaven ? 

I 
Let not the land once proud of him 

Insult him now, 
Nor brand with deeper shame his dim 

Dishonored brow. 

Of all we loved and honored, naught 

But power remains ; 
A fallen Angel's pride of thought 

Still strong in chains. 

All else is gone ; from those great e} r es 

The soul is fled ; 
When faith is lost, when honor dies, 

The man is dead. 

Then pay the reverence of old days 

To his dead fame ; 
Walk backward, with averted gaze, 

And hide the shame !" 

By this powerful but abortive effort to impale for 
shame the foremost, and by far the grandest, figure in 
New England history, "the people's poet," in these 
cruel stanzans, has supplied the honest seeker after 
truth, through all coming time, with a life-like photo- 
graph of that frenzied Public Opinion which had en- 
thralled and debased the Northern mind, and to 
which the author himself was pandering. As also 
pandered the painter who frescoed within the dome of 
the capitol at Washington, in full view from the ro- 
tunda, the figures of Robert E. Lee, Alexander 
Hamilton Stephens and Stonewall Jackson, as 
discomfited and terror-stricken traitors, crouching be- 
neath the out-spread talons of the triumphant 
American Eagle ; where they still remain ! — to put 
to blush the nation whose laws are enacted, beneath 
the lying daub ; and as they shall remain — grouped 
in history with Daniel Webster, and the purest, 



37 

bravest and most self -devoting patriots of all the ages — 
to claim forever the supreme admiration of mankind ! 
Such, assuredly, must be the verdict of posterity 
when, in the full, pure light of truth, unaffected by 
interest, prejudice, or passion, it shall come to review 
that domination of Force — hydra-headed, million- 
handed — w^hich for so many deplorable years tortured 
the South and darkened the Land ; tempered at times, 
undoubtedly, by the broad patriotism and ever-active 
humanity of Lincoln, and by the unostentatious, 
though heroic, magnanimity of Grant : but checked 
only by the loyalty of the Supreme Court, which, 
clinging steadfastly to the vital principles of the Gov- 
ernment, has finally restored to the American Nation 
of u indestructible" State Sovereignties the calm rule 
of the Constitution. Be it perpetual ! 



A 



